The right-wing noise machine, Spanish edition, is launching this week just in time for wrecking Democrats' chances among Hispanic voters in the 2022 midterms.
The nation’s first Spanish-language conservative network launches Tuesday morning on satellite radio, opening a new front in the political information wars targeting Latinos in the United States and beyond.
The network, called Americano, arrives during a crucial inflection point in U.S. politics, as more Hispanic voters show signs of drifting right and Democrats continue to sound the alarm about Spanish-language right-wing disinformation on social media and local radio, particularly in Miami, which is also Americano’s home base.
It's scheduled to launch first on SiriusXM radio, then on streaming TV this summer, offering a mix of news programming and commentary. The network has close ties to former President Donald Trump's campaign, as well as to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who now represents the more moderate wing of the Republican Party. Ahead of the Tuesday broadcast, Democrats in Florida raised concerns publicly and privately that the programming would contribute to the spread of misleading claims targeted at Spanish-speakers that skyrocketed during the pandemic and the 2020 campaign.
Americano’s founder and CEO, Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo, bristled at the notion that the privately funded network is going to purvey disinformation or misinformation, and accused Democrats of trying to cancel speech they don’t like.
"They’re scared. And they should be,” Garcia-Hidalgo said of Democrats in an interview. "Democrats took Hispanics for granted for too long, and no one thought to create a home for us in conservative media. There is an appetite for this. You see it on social media. You see it in elections."
Nowhere is that more apparent in the United States than in Miami-Dade County, home to a large and dynamic population with roots throughout Latin America, and a location where Trump dramatically improved his performance between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The former president’s support was fueled by support from exile communities of those who fled leftist regimes or violence in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Colombia.
Aside from tapping into strong anti-socialist sentiment, Trump also broadened his Latino support nationwide with an emphasis on blue-collar, pro-business and anti-Covid lockdown messages that played better with Hispanic voters — from Florida to Philadelphia to Wisconsin to the Texas border.
Democrats, meanwhile, have attributed Trump’s gains in part to a deluge of Spanish-language disinformation in the lead-up to the 2020 election, and point out that he nevertheless lost Hispanic voters by double-digit margins nationwide. About a third of Latinos consistently vote Republican nationally.
Pollster Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based consultant who oversaw Barack Obama’s successful national Hispanic outreach, fretted that Americano could be a success — at least politically — even if it doesn’t spread falsehoods or conspiracies.
“For those concerned about the disinformation problem harming Democrats' chances with Hispanics, this is a Defcon 1 moment. We should worry,” Amandi said. “The Democrats’ response to all of this Hispanic outreach from Republicans — whether it's disinformation or conventional campaigning — is to do the bare minimum. Unfortunately, some Democrats are deluding themselves. The ultimate act of disinformation is to pretend that this is not a big problem.”
But as Steve M. reminds us, it's very much going to be wall-to-wall disinformation.
A great deal of Spanish-language disinformation made its way to Hispanic voters in the U.S. in 2020. It's not clear whether Americano plans to spread lies or simply rely on the usual anti-liberal bile. But buried in paragraph 26 of this story is one name -- a non-Hispanic name -- that should give us pause.
Americano’s chief strategy officer, former Trump campaign and White House adviser Michael Caputo, said the company “has investors, not donors.” ...“I’m doing this because it’s going to be a profitable business. I could use some money after the Russia investigation,” he said, joking.
Though never charged with wrongdoing, Caputo was swept up in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election because of his past work involving Kremlin-linked Russian propaganda and his aid to the 2016 Trump campaign. This has led to a whisper campaign among Miami Democrats, who said his involvement with Americano was evidence that it would be a breeding ground for disinformation.
It's not a whisper campaign at all, it's reality. Caputo is Trump's former HHS spokesman, largely responsible for pushing wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about the CDC, theories so wacko that he was forced to quit. Since then, he has publicly said that he believes the January 6th sedition was a false flag attack to cover up "Biden's election theft".
Of course it's going to be a massive outlet for direct disinformation, and it's going to be a key player in GOP control of Texas, Florida, Arizona and more. Democrats have no real long-term plan to counter it, either.
If Republicans get the majority of the Hispanic vote in November, you'll know why.
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